User Research | Lean UX | Agile
As a part of Dell's "Digital Transformation" there was great interest in getting a holistic view of the (then) current state of it's commerce platform. For this project there would be no experience output, only research and insights to help guide other teams in their discovery phases.
We were a cross-functional agile team consisting of 1 designer, 1 product manager, and 1 engineering lead. We wanted to be as lean as possible so we could move quickly through roughly 20 in depth user interviews with teams throughout the company. A larger team would have made scheduling and logistics a challenge.
We began by identifying key stakeholder throughout the company from the engineering, CSAT, Ops, GCP, and marketing teams. Next we pulled together all the questions we wanted to probe on more into a discussion guide. But before getting too far into interviews we needed to educate ourselves on what an a commerce platform was.
We also wanted to map out any assumptions we had of our own. By this point our team had grown with the addition of more engineers on the team so a lot of the assumptions were technical. Running this exercise would later help us in education the team that the issues we uncovered go well beyond the technology stack.
One of the underlying problems we found with they system is that when every different "Store" relies on a core set of platform services that when one of those services becomes unavailable, the entire store goes down. This is versus having a centralized platform manage those services so that only a single service for that store is affected.
Conducting that many diverse interviews can often produce a seemingly overwhelming amount of data so we utilized Optimal Workshop's data visualization to more quickly pull together high level trends and key insights. From the chord diagram's below you can see that the data feeding the platform is a huge point of friction and was mentioned by all parties during interviews.
The 4 biggest themes we found were:
Data marketing needs is not accurate and therefore cannot make realtime or proactive decisions
Platform problems start with data from sku management
Organizational fragmentation and silos create ownership and collaboration problems
Engineering can only build experiences as good as the data that feeds them
